There can be no doubt, after his latest outburst, that the arch-atheist is
doing the Lord’s work

In The Selfish Gene, his seminal tome published in 1976, Richard Dawkins invented the now voguish word “meme” for a thought or idea that spreads osmotically throughout a culture. Today, the high table hyper-narcissist has extended that word to me-me-me-me-me-me-me, forever demanding that we look at him and pay homage to his colossally superior intellect.

While the geneticist and militant atheist’s brilliance is not in doubt (this newspaper ranked him 20th in a 2007 list of living geniuses) there is an elite sub-genus of humanity, if I might invent a phrase of my own, called The Clever Fools. These are people whose extraordinary cerebral gifts are yoked, lethally, to the common sense and judgment of an amoeba, and Dawkins is their god.

His latest sortie into the realm of religious controversy concerns the followers of Islam. “All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge,” he tweeted this week, in what seemed an unorthodox welcome to the festival of Eid. “They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.” He might have added the phrase du jour employed by those who, after throwing a hand grenade into social media, feebly try to distance themselves from the collateral damage. But presumably he had exhausted his 140 characters, and had none left for the faux naif “Just sayin’…”

His claim is technically true, the scoreline being Trinity 32: Muslims 10. But as others, including our own Tom Chivers, have pointed out with far more elegance than you would expect from this column, his real point was crystal clear. The lobotomising strictures of Koranic teaching and extremist dogma, goes the subtext, has atrophied the Muslim mind so completely over the centuries that these robotic drones have produced far fewer Nobel laureates than a single weeny college.

The observation is too plain dumb to detain us for long. It needs no spelling out that the Muslim world is dramatically less wealthy and academically well served than the West as a whole, and the Oxbridge candidate pool in particular. Whether he was being casually racist is another question, and not a particularly relevant or intriguing one. As he pointed out in his own defence, while scurrying away from the original tweet in a craven and effete version of Knock Down Ginger, Islam is a religion, not a race. So is Judaism, of course, and one doubts he would have the courage to make any such incendiary remark about “the Jews”.

But since it is always me me me me me me me with Dawkins, as he reminds us that he is soooooo much cleverer than all the thickies who ever believed in any god (Leonardo da Vinci, Socrates, other dummies of that ilk) let’s gratify him by making what follows all about him, and by asking this. Can there be any residual doubt, after this latest imbecility, that Richard Dawkins is in the service of the global cabal of faiths henceforth to be known as Big Religa?

I write as one who became a devout atheist at the age of nine, and has encountered nothing since – with the two exceptions of the globe artichoke and the mango – that hints at the work of an intelligent super-being. And yet whenever I hear Dawkins on the car radio, spluttering lividly at the stupidity of those who cannot see the truth as clearly as he does, the instinct is to do a handbrake turn and drive like a maniac to the nearest church, synagogue, temple or mosque. He preaches so conceitedly, and with such poisonously illiberal scorn for those who follow the great faiths, that I want to worship alongside every one of them. While the new Pope seems a genuinely holy kinda guy, and the new Archbishop of Canterbury an absolute sweetheart, Dawkins is more repressively dogmatic than the Ayatollahs. Give him such comedy props as a milky eye and a hook, and he’d come across as crazier than Abu Hamza.

What I suspect must have happened was that, some time in the late Seventies, the leaders of the world’s great religions met in secret conclave to discuss the threat posed by the march of science. Appreciating that the unravelling of the genetic code would one day enable life to be created in a test tube, thereby usurping the primary function of the Creator, they came up with a wickedly ironic plan. They would recruit the world’s leading geneticist, and run him under deep cover as a double agent for Big Religa. His brief was first to win the slavish respect of the atheist community, as he did with his meisterwork The God Delusion; and then to pretend to go so infuriatingly and offensively doolally that atheists would find the faiths he derided infinitely more appealing than their fiercest foe, and flock to them. This plot he has carried out to the letter. I would now rather spend a year in a Cistercian monastery or a madrassa than a minute listening to Richard Dawkins.

Maybe the sleeper theory is fanciful. For one thing, without wishing to be sucked into theological debate, is there any stronger argument against the existence of a benign deity today than the existence of Richard Dawkins? Perhaps he is nothing more than the cleverest of fools as he struts the stage with the craving for admiring attention of the cocaine-era Robin Williams doing his range of hilarious characters on a chat show?

Whatever the explanation, the Dawkins journey is complete and its symmetry is perfect. The man who made his reputation with The Selfish Gene has finished – and please God he is finished – by entitling the unofficial book of his life The Genius Self.